Runway Tears / Terrain Issues in Photogrammetry Areas

I’m really getting tired of this. With or without custom scenery. Fast or slow. And, I don’t think I need to turn off photogrammetry just so I can land. Landing is a basic function of a flight simulator. This should have a priority!
Bakersfield is a PG area, and turning off PG resolves the problem.

KBFL Meadows Airport, Bakersfield, CA
Ultra graphics setting with photogrammetry
Windows 10, i5 Intel and RTX2070

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That’s odd. I can see what happened. A similar thing happened to me at LFPG on WU4 release day, due to overpasses not at the same height as taxiways.

But I can’t see any runway tears in your image, only the end result.

The don’t last long, tiles move up or down while the scene goes to the highest detail level. I’m exploring all the PG Areas in the USA and see it all the time now. Most are little bumps, some make my plane bounce back up and once in a blue moon it’s so bad the plane flips.

Also sometimes the plane gets stuck in the runway after landing (while the tiles are still going up or down) and won’t move anymore. Slew mode to reset it to the proper height.

It’s easy to replicate by leaving the drone on a PG runway, fly off and switch back to the drone after you’ve flown out of range. Then watch the scene resolve. At the final stage you see the runway change from one solid stretch at first to the individual final PG segments.

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I tried that, at someone else’s request, and at the airport of their choosing, and I couldn’t replicate it. The video I uploaded is in this thread.

I think there is more to this than “such a such location is broken”, otherwise this would be more widespread than it is. Given that some users have reported the problem goes away if you switch off PG, and users have also said that it happens more often with jets than props, speed would seem to be a factor, and that leads me in the direction of internet speed.

If you get to the location faster than the terrain can load, the problem occurs? That might be why I have never seen it. I used to have 220Mbps, now have 550Mbps broadband.

In that video you stayed pretty much close to the runway. The tears are visible in the water at around 1:05 btw.

It’s so easy to replicate:

That looks like you moved the camera away a long way, then turned off the drone camera to appear in the cockpit, thereby forcing the scenery to redraw around you? That’s not what I was asked to duplicate, which was to use the drone camera to zoom about a PG airport. Which I did, and you’ll note that I did see height differences in the water at the time, but not on the runway where it matters most.

I think that would always do it, no matter how fast your broadband is. Have you ever used the dev. mode to teleport to another ICAO? Same thing there, but its much more severe as initially there is no scenery around you whatsoever.

It’s a synthetic test, not what you would see/do in normal usage, but does illustrate the problem. I’ll try that tonight. Which airport is that?

KBFI, it’s not that far away and yes it demonstrates exactly what will happen when you’re landing while the sim is busy loading PG away from you. Sometimes it might load in time, but it’s not guaranteed. This can happen even when the data is cached.

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That doesn’t make sense, unless PG scenery is never cached. Or it is loaded from cache, but takes longer to load into the sim than non-PG cached scenery. In any case I will try some flights around there, and try the drone trick as well.

When you recorded that footage, was it repeatable i.e. is there anything I could do to contaminate the test. I assume you spawned on the runway, or taxied there, so the scenery should have already loaded. I would plan to fly there from 40 miles away in the the first instance, land, then try the drone thing.

Try setting the arrival to KBFI RW14R on the world map, that will set you up for a simple straight-in landing. Use an approach speed of around 160kts.

Feel free to experiment with other PG areas.

160kts is way faster than my normal approach speed. :wink:

I was planning on setting a baseline first. 14R matched what was in your image. The route I was looking at was this, but we’ll see how that holds with the weather. I can always turn the weather of, of course.

KBLI N0100A030 KIENO6 JAWBN6 KBFI

IFR Bellingham Intl (KBLI) to Boeing King Co Intl (KBFI).pln (4.7 KB)

Speed here is the issue, I think, as you suggest. Too fast, and the scenery doesn’t load in on time. And that could also be affected by how fast your broadband is.

It’s a PG specific problem, so yep it goes away when you turn PG data off. Internet speed can be a factor, just as terrain detail (draw distance) and travel speed.

It doesn’t matter how fast your internet is as it often gets throttled and the problem also occurs when everything is coming from cache. (The data coming from cache still has to be processed) If you have a really fast CPU, fast RAM, a small draw distance and don’t fly too fast, the sim will stay ahead of you and you won’t see it.

My CPU is only 2.2 ghz, bandwidth is fine, yet with terrain detail at 100 I see it frequently in PG areas. In London I can only go 40 knots with all data fully cached on SSD or the terrain will start to degrade.

The problem isn’t so much that the sim can’t keep up, the real problem is the height difference between the ‘prefab’ runway and the PG tiles. If it were the same height it would not be a problem.

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I don’t have a top end system any more: 9900K, 32GB, 3090FE, 1080p @ Ultra, terrain 200. I tend to fly GA, and with the 3090 I can even fly over PG London, and get decent framerates. Something akin to pre-SU3 London with my EVGA 1080 FTW.

I tend to fly GA, so the fastest I might fly would be either the TBM or the Gravel Vertigo.

I was flying patterns yesterday cycling the PG on and off. It is 100% consistent, the problem is the PG with only the depth of the curb I hit varying. I too do not think it is internet speed. Also, clearly this is happening in a C172 with a landing speed of 68knts. I’m not seeing how jets vs GA make a difference.

Curious: is it possible to mask the PG for the runway or surrounding area? I’m not s scenery designer, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. Just a thought.
One other thought: I have seen tears while taxiing and taking off, but it is way more pronounced while landing. Could it have to do with the angle the scenery initially gets loaded at?

@hobanagerik That’s a 3.6 to 5.0 ghz CPU, so you already have over twice the raw processing speed as me with 2.2 ghz (boost disabled due to prevent thermal throttling, laptop). And when you deduct the time needed for everything else, you probably have over 3x times the ‘extra time’ to prepare terrain ahead.

I slow down very late on landing, have the bad habit to use the flaps for air braking after turning the engine to idle, 95% of my landings are no power glide in, touching down at 80-90 knots. (Beechcraft Bonanza) Whatever sim update 3 did, it made the Bonanza pretty unstable under 80 knots, it tends to stall (roll over) at 70 knots (with full flaps) while the specifications state stall speed is 52 knots in landing configuration.

Anyway, fast approach, landing at speed, usually a direct approach in no pattern, not enough time for the sim to complete updating the ground.

@sldghmmr2001 I have no idea, never played with the scenery editor. The memory in the sim fragmants over time and there doesn’t seem to be a logical order in which tiles get updated (or rather finished). They all process in parallel so the easiest ones are finished first I guess. Of course while taxiing you go a lot slower than flying in, and perhaps there is some logic to prioritize tiles closer to you the lower you are. It would make sense as you rarely look straight down while flying so tiles ahead should have the priority while in the air.

I’m just speculating, the one test I did to look at how the game processes the scenery did not prioritize the camera position in any way. It’s up somewhere in this thread, I’ll post the link again.

Maybe you can make some sense out of it. My plane is miles away so maybe tiles closer to the plane have the priority. It’s a bit odd how things work, for example the landing lights (white and red glide slope lights) respond to the camera position and change as you move the drone up and down. No clue what else is tied to the camera position and not the plane.

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Before I even got to KBFI I saw these:


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I repeated my test at KBFI with the current version (1.17.3.0). It’s already better than in March but still takes a while to load with tears along the way. I put up dev mode as well to make it easier to compare what the next update brings, hopefully a big improvement. (FPS is a bit lower due to video recording, hit 30 when I stopped recording)

@hobanagerik That looks like the transition between sat/aerial data tiles and PG data tiles, clearly not on the same height. I rarely fly that high, especially not over PG areas. I must say, Seattle is blended in pretty well. A lot of PG areas in California are brown stains in the terrain from that altitude.

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Going by that video as an example, and if you were actually flying in to that airport, as long as it took you longer than a minute to get to that location, presented at that detail level, it should have finished loading before you touch down.

I might try a similar test myself this weekend. Did you take off from there, fly away some distance, then move the drone camera there, then switch the camera back after some time to force the redraw?

Correct. I actually placed the camera first (it had me start on the other end of the runway) to match my previous video. Then tab to decouple the drone view from the plane, take off to fly a long distance away while climbing to 20,000ft, far enough away that nothing from around KBFI is in memory anymore.

When far enough away I paused the sim and waited for all network and disk activity to be done and allocated memory to settle, just making sure it wasn’t occupied with working on terrain anymore. Start the video recording and switch back to the drone.

I have no rolling cache active so that includes fetching everything fresh from the server. It might be a bit faster with rolling cache or slower. Maybe it’s a bit faster when flying out over open ocean, I’m not only measuring time to load the new scene, meanwhile it’s also unloading the scene where the plane is. Switching back to the plane comes back to an empty world again. (can repeat it as many times as you want)

While flying to the location there is a lot more going on. You’re already flying over a PG area thus the sim is constantly unloading old tiles, fetching and preparing new tiles, adjusting LOD for existing tiles as you are moving along. Add weather on top, looking around, and it becomes a lot easier to arrive before the runway is fully assembled.

I had no trip ups today, but after one landing the ground moved up and down, actually making my plane briefly airborne before it fell back to the ground. I arrived and stopped before the tears happened. Heavy localized storm cells today, also a big drain on performance.

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San Francisco runway 28R are stairs. Impossible to land there. Airplane jumps and is then broken.
Has been defective for a long time. But it won’t even be fixed

Have you filled a bug report/searched for a report and voted on it?

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